For those new to the internet, search can be a little intimidating. To perform better web searches, you need to know a little bit about how a search engine thinks. Here are a few tips to help you better find what you're looking for.

The video above demonstrates the techniques we're going to go over here, but we'll also link you to a few more advanced options if you want to learn even more. Here are the basic things you want to know when searching the web:

Imagine what the page you're going to find will say. Your head may hurt, but the page you're looking for will use more specific terms like headache or migraine. You want to be as specific as you can when searching.

The fewer search terms you can use to communicate what you want is best. For example, "what is the best headache medicine?" would work better as "best headache medicine".

When you search, your words get moved around. For example, "best headache medicine" is the same as "medicine headache best" (as far as the search engine is concerned). If you want to search for a specific phrase and keep your words in the order you typed them, just put quotes around them.

Punctuation is pretty much ignored when you search, so there's no need to type it. This includes @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and most other special characters. Searches are also case insensitive, so don't feel the need to capitalize anything—it doesn't matter.